Esther McVey received less of a grilling for misleading parliament than most vulnerable people do trying to claim universal credit

The only comfort to be derived from all this is that universal credit is so flawed, so cruel and so unpopular that it promises to be the Tories’ new poll tax

Some years ago, when the secretary of state for work and pensions was a television presenter, she appeared in a show called How Do They Do That? A clip of one particular segment, “Play the Piano Without Practice”, can be readily found on YouTube. In it she promised that she, who had never previously had any tuition, would be taught how to play piano in six minutes, with the help of a talented professional, Rainer Hersch.

The twist was that Esther McVey didn’t learn to play the piano at all, but merely sat next to Hersch swaying around and looking as though she was playing, while in fact her fingers never depressed a single key.

This also seems to be her approach to high ministerial office. She sways at the dispatch box, she reads out a carefully worded statement of apology, concentrating so hard as she does so that she scarcely looks up from the text, but you get the impression that she is really just going through the motions. Flanked by a couple of real politicians, Sajid Javid and David Lidington, who are maestros on the political pianoforte, she almost convinced us that she was the real thing. In fact, she so fooled the speaker that he exercised unusual indulgence towards her.

She, in other words, got away with “inadvertently” misleading MPs about what the National Audit Office had said about universal credit. She had said it wanted the rollout speeded up; it had said that the introduction had been botched and billions wasted, but that there was now no alternative to pressing on with it. McVey gave the impression that mixing these two accounts up was the kind of slip anyone could make. In fact her spin on the NAO report was so much the diametrical opposite of what it said that the auditor general, Amyas Morse, wrote to her to complain, a highly unusual intervention.

Frank Field, a sort of parliamentary version of the BBC’s Watchdog show, is promising an Urgent Question. But basically, McVey suffered rather less than the average person with disabilities does when trying to get their allowance sorted out.

The only comfort to be derived from all this is that universal credit is so flawed, so cruel and so unpopular that it promises to be the Tories’ new poll tax. Like the hated poll tax, or community charge as it was formally called, a too-radical administrative reform crept up on them in the late 1980s and bit them so hard they lost a prime minister, Maggie Thatcher, partly as a result of it (and partly also a result of some serious Tory splits on Europe, eerily enough).

Universal credit has the potential to do much the same, and to take ministerial careers down with it, not least that of McVey. One day she won’t be able to get away with it, because what her government is doing is so wrong and so stupid that they can’t. They’ll all be found out.

In the meantime McVey will carry on with her charade of being a minister, during which time the public will not be able to work out whether she is deliberately spinning them, or whether she understands her ministerial brief so badly that she needs to be carried by her civil servants and is prone to making gaffes.

Either way it’s unsatisfactory, and, were the government not losing too many ministers with quite so much frequency at the moment, she might well have faced being “sanctioned” herself by Theresa May.

As it stands McVey is the fourth secretary of state in two years who has been overseeing, if that’s the right word, the introduction of universal credit in this obviously strong and stable Conservative administration. Their tenures were shorter than the time some people take to get their benefits out of the DWP. Pub quiz-style, see how many you can name/recall: Stephen Crabb (March to July 2016, quit); Damian Green (July 2016 to June 2017, quit/sacked); David Gauke (June 2017 to January 2018, reshuffled), and now the admittedly memorable McVey. I wonder how long this charlatan will last?